Internet Exchangesand Routing - APAN's Persepctive -

v.2Internet Exchanges and Routing- APAN's Persepctive -

Kilnam ChonKAIST, KoreaAPAN Chair

1. Introduction

Asia Pacific Advanced Network(APAN) was formed in 1997.[1,2,3] APAN is one ofthe second generation Internet for research and education community likeInternet 2 in USA[4], CA*net 2, 3, 4 in Canada[5], and TEN 155 in Europe[6].

APAN network was formed to provide high performance network to the research and education community in Asia-Pacific region through appropriate networkdesign such as the Internet exchange points and access points, efficientrouting, quality of service, performance measurement and tuning, and so on.

Three Internet exchange points were set up in Tokyo, Seoul and Singaporein addition to STAR TAP in Chicago, which is operated by Internet 2 Communityin USA. These three exchange points provide Layer 2 connections as well asLayer 3 connections. All three exchange points and STAR TAP were fullyconnected to provide efficient routing. The routing is fairly simple inAPAN. Usually, packets are routed to one of the three exchange points, thenforwarded to the relevant exchange point, or to the destination accesspoint, or the gateway of another network. Some of the link has specificAUP to prohibit certain types of traffic such as commercial traffic.See Figure 1 for the current network configuration of APAN.

Quality of service could be provided based on DiffServe, or allocation ofPVC to specific applications. DiffServe is working reasonable well such as the video conferencing between Tokyo in Japan and Daejeon in Korea during the recent KOREN Workshop.

Performance measurements on delay, throughput, and other factors are doneat all exchange points as well as some access points. Performance tuningbased on these measurements are done, in particular across the Pacific.

2. Regional and National Internet Exchanges

Through our experience of APAN, and other first and second generationInternets, we agree that we need one or more neutral national Internetexchange point which must be operated in transparent manner. STAR TAPand APAN Tokyo Exchange Point are the notable examples of such neutraltransparent exchange points, but they are for research and educationcommunity and not for the whole Internet community.

Many countries have one or more Internet exchanges in their countries.Some of them are operated by ISPs, and others are operated by publicorganizations. The former do not offer neutral exchanges. The lattertend to be inefficient due to nature of non-commercial service. The mostimportant factor for the Internet exchanges is service quality. ManyInternet exchanges are of poor quality throughout the world.

Private peering is also very common due to various reasons; lack ofInternet exchange, lack of neutral Internet exchange, lack of broadbandInternet exchange, and so on. One extreme case is that two major ISPsin Korea have private peering with capacity of 10 Gbps between them.

In many Asian countries, there is strong demand to have one or more efficient,and neutral Internet exchange in their countries, and they may be operatedby a consortium to guarantee neutrality and transparency. We may needgood collaboration among these exchanges for connectivity, networkengineering, and so on. We need to come up with some scheme to provideacceptable service quality, which is often lacking anywhere in the world.Some of the national Internet exchanges may function as regional Internetexchanges. Candidate locations would include Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing,Hong Kong and Singapore. The one in Tokyo is coming close to such aneutral regional Internet exchange.[8]

3. Broadband Access for Next Generation Internet

Broadband accesses beyond dialup and ISDN are some of the hot issues lately. There are two categories for the broadband access; electricwires, and optical fiber. The electic wires include cable modem andtwisted pair for DSL. They typically offer fraction of mbps toseveral mbps. The optical fiber offer 10 mbps to 1 gbps.

The broadband access using the cable modem and DLS took off in Koreawith 40% of the household, or over 80% of the Internet users accessusing these services now with USA next with around 10%, and othersless than 10%. Watching television program through the Internetis common practice in Korea now.

The broadband access using the optical fiber is yet to come. There arenumerous experiements going on around the world. Canada and Swedenamong others started offering large scale services[3, 9] with typicallycapacity of 100 mbps with occasional 1 gbps. Japan plans to offerthe optical fiber access with 10 and 100 mbps in 2001.

With broadband access becoming increasing common, in particular in Asia,we need to be ready with good backbone networks and the Internet exchanges.The demand on capacity and performance at these networks and exchangeswould be great, and we should be ready for acceptable services.

4. Future

All next generation networks for research and education community in theworld are heading for optical Internet with ever increasing bandwidth.Canada is leading in this technology by offering CA*net 3 and CA*net 4.USA is coming up with STAR LIGHT, the Internet exchange for opticalinterconnect. Europe is following with similar network plans, too.In Asia, APAN and others need to upgrade their networks similarly.This is particularly true since many national research and educationnetwors are becoming optical Internet with typical capacity of 1 to 10gbps for access and backbone, and the international networks such as APANhas to handle multiple gbps traffic. This would be the challenge for thecoming years for APAN.